Reasons why your website needs an SEO audit

A lot of businesses are under the impression that if they go through the trouble of building a website once, they never need to change it again. A little optimization here and there, some useful content, a contact form – and we’re all done. The truth is that creating a website for your business is just the beginning of a long journey toward building your online presence. That is why we have professional SEO service providers. It’s important for a website to be planned out and optimized from the very start. And once you’re done with that, you need to maintain that optimization and adapt to all new algorithm updated and trends. Today, we discuss the reasons why your website needs an SEO audit from time to time.

Why bother with SEO instead of PPC?

Facts can do all the talking here. And facts tell us that over 90 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. People turn to search engines whenever they need information. And even though paid ads are part of search engines and do appear on SERPs, they are still ads. And nearly 80 percent of online users tend to opt for organic links rather than paid ads. And if this is not enough of an argument for you, you are welcome to explore our full take on the matter of paid advertising vs SEO.

Certainly, one might argue that SEO takes a lot of time and resources to bear fruit. However, one might also argue that once applied properly and once it takes flight, an SEO strategy will secure a constant flow of organic traffic on your website, and thus quality leads. But the only way to ensure that is through the development of a strong and optimized website. And that brings us to the matter of why your website needs an SEO audit.

10 reasons why your website needs an SEO audit from time to time

1. Higher Website Performance

Both modern consumers and search engines have an appreciation for quality web design and development. That is why strong brands go through the trouble of hiring experienced web design New York companies. It’s important to ensure that your website can offer a high standard of speed, security, and user experience. That is the ticket to not only becoming competitive but also becoming dominant in your market.

The way how an SEO audit fits into the story here is that it helps you realize where there is room for improvement. Over time, websites become cluttered, mistakes are made, and security issues arise. Rather than waiting for an error to occur and put your website in a hole, why not act preventively? By performing SEO audits on a regular basis, businesses can monitor the quality of their websites and make necessary adjustments to keep them up-to-date and on point.

2. Keeping up with Trends

SEO has become so enticing and advanced that it is practically a digital organism. As time passes, it grows and evolves constantly. And if you miss out on one period of its existence, you are already falling behind and trying to catch up. In the beginning, you could implement spam tactics and press releases to build links and earn value from search engines. SEO is much more complex and demanding today. It requires a lot of finesse and constant modifications. But in order to truly comprehend that, you need to perform SEO audits on a regular basis.

3. Keyword Analysis

All businesses want to earn rankings on SERPs – that much is obvious when you invest in SEO activities. However, most businesses lack the understanding of which keywords their website should rank for. In our previous article, we touched on the topic of keyword research mistakes that usually occur. One of the reasons why your website needs an SEO audit is to explore your current rankings and choice of keywords. You can then learn whether or not these are the keywords you want to be chasing after or if there are better-suited ones for your brand to pursue.

And once you do revise your choice of keywords, you can start to refocus your content strategy as well. Much like everything in SEO, one change invites another, and so on. But it all starts with that initial step of checking the keywords you are currently investing resources in.

4. Competitive Analysis

Businesses often underestimate the knowledge that they can acquire from looking at their competitors. When you see your website underperforming, it’s time to look at what your competitors are doing and to learn from their success. By doing an SEO audit of your website and theirs, you can identify the differences between the two. That alone can give you a general idea of which segments of your website can be improved. Competitive SEO analysis is a common practice that professional digital marketers NYC suggests.

5. Backlink Analysis

Link building carries a lot of value for websites in the eyes of search engines. The ratio between referring domains and backlinks combined with anchor texts can offer great value for your website if done right. The way an SEO audit fits into the story is that it helps you see just where you stand in terms of your backlink profile. Since algorithms have surpassed black hat SEO tactics for obtaining backlinks, websites need to invest time and resources into link earning and quality links. By analyzing your backlinks through auditing, you can adapt your overall linking strategy to better fit the standards of search engines.

6. Improved User Experience

Creating a website is not a simple matter of web development solutions. It also requires visual appeal and usability. Businesses need to consider the experience of users who land on their websites. Because it is that user experience that will give them value in the eyes of Google. SEO audits can reveal navigational, functional, and/or structural flaws such as:

• Header/footer layout;
• CTA positioning;
• Existence of sitemaps;
• 404 error pages;
• Broken links;
• Missing ‘alt’ tags for images;
• Page loading speed;
• etc.

7. New Business Opportunities

We’ve already established that looking at competitors can provide you with insight on where you can do better in terms of optimization. However, SEO analyses can often point out relations with other niches, partners, affiliates, etc. And through that data, you can discover new potential sources of revenue and marketing tactics to explore.

8. Content Modifications

We’ve gone and covered the technical aspects of why your website needs an SEO audit. But there is also the matter of looking at the content. Being the most crucial element in building a strong website, content quality is what will influence the behavior of your target audience. However, content elements such as word count, keyword usage, heading and subheadings, meta titles and descriptions, etc. – will all fall under the radar of search engine bots. Audits can help you improve your content for site visitors as well as crawlers.

Get a free SEO audit for your website today!

The amount of knowledge that can come from conducting regular audits of your website is endless. It is this process that leaves room for constant improvements. And that is exactly why your website needs an SEO audit from trained professionals that understand which elements to inspect. Digital Dot offers a free website marketing analysis for companies in all niches. Our team will go through your website and point out all the good and less good sides of it. We will also offer suggestions on where there is room for improvement.